Claude Johann Čierny
(Film Studies, Charles University)
Deborah Menšlová
(Photography, UMPRUM)
Tomáš Samek
(Media Studies, Charles University)
Viktória Žigmundová
(Architecture, UMPRUM)
The project is based on a hyperbolic prolongation of the present political tendencies in the context of climate change response. It tells a story of a future eco-terrorist group called EcoNemesis that chooses to accelerate environmental destruction in order to inflict a civilizational collapse and a subsequent rise of a new socio-ecological formation. The video is part of the radicals’ propaganda – it applies the tactics of exaggeration, simplification, disinformation and kitsch aesthetics to make a compelling argument. The current political regime and status quo of environmental management are depicted as a manifestation of human “parasitism” on nature.
The establishment of the eco-terrorist movement is preceded by a long-term conflict between a populist government ignoring the rampant environmental and climate crises and violently oppressed activist groups. As a last resort, the hopeless dissent opts to appropriate the anthropocentrism of the domineering civilizational order and to magnify the practices that correspond with the denial of an age-long environmental degradation. Driving humans to the brink of extinction by supporting exhaustion or pollution of water resources is mobilized as a strategy to overthrow a system where all attempts at a peaceful socio-ecological transition have failed. The eco-terrorist group’s hope is to lay the foundations of a newly restored human society upon the ruins of the inherently self-destructive civilization. It imagines the new social order to be based on the idea of commensalism (as opposed to parasitism) and a harmonious coexistence with Nature.
The authors accompany the video with the following disclaimer:
“The narrator is a member of the group EcoNemesis whose views are ambivalent to us: on the one hand, we sympathize with their efforts to change human society and strive for a more respectful relationship with nature, bu on the other hand, we disagree with the naivety of accelerationism, the anthropomorphization of nature, the motives of neoliberal propaganda and we definitely disagree with the violent solutions.
The group finds itself in an extreme situation the seeds of which can be traced in the present, and some of their views are rendered hyperbolical in order to criticize various tendencies of contemporary discourses concerning ecology. At the same time, we have tried to point out the possibility of an escalation of the current controversies concerning ecology and to highlight the possible radicalization of both sides – the more conservative and the more ecologically conscious.”
Format: video, 7 min 25 s
